Delhi (10 page)

‘English medium' schools are especially popular, promising future salaries a third higher. At university, you won't study a subject like mine. Bachelors degrees in he humanities and social sciences are generally for dolts. The real kids study science, computing, engineering, commerce, and idolize the MBA.

In reality, much of the Indian education system does not encourage the development of entrepreneurs. Quite the opposite. It is famous for encouraging rote learning, right up to memorizing out-of-date facts and errors in the textbooks. The system is wracked by accusations of grade inflation and bribery. Amartya Sen's
Argumentative Indian
, with his fondness for debate and democracy, also only works up to a point: the schools are incredibly hierarchical. In Bangalore, I worked under a boss who wouldn't have recognized a good research design if it had brained him with a clipboard. My two Indian teammates realized in the abstract that he was a blithering idiot. In practice, though, when he entered the room to blither they stood and saluted. Employers complain they face a serious dearth of skilled, articulate labour.

The entrepreneurship dream can't match the reality. It's all very well valorizing high-reward risk-taking, but stability is underrated. Still a majority of youngsters aspire to work for the government. Corporate ‘trainings' in personality development and soft skills also raise and dash expectations. They promise to unlock employees' potential and turn them into budding entrepreneurs. Workers are meant to internalize the demands of the workplace by fashioning themselves into competitive, self-motivated, perpetually smiling individuals—even when they are working as a cyber coolie in a call centre or in a faceless clothes factory for very low wages. One social anthropologist calls it an attempt to create ‘shrink wrapped souls'. Huge numbers burn out, frustrated by exhausting realities.

The real strategies needed for success may be much less romantic. Mohsin Hamid's recent novel is structured like a self-help book, telling ‘you'
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
. It has some slightly more unsettling lessons than the classics on sale on the CP pavements. Befriend a bureaucrat, be prepared to use violence, and embrace debt. There may not be an entirely happy ending.

It might not focus on technical improvisation, but this is
jugaad
too.
Jugaad
can be a dark art. It's ingenuity and ‘fixing' in the broadest sense. So much of Indian entrepreneurship relies on the shadowy network of fixers, middlemen and associations who regulate the structure and flows of the system. The banking system is timid and state-dominated, the state is aloof or compromised whilst still controlling access to a vast number of resources and licenses. Navigating the system takes
political
savvy, not just technical skill. Personal contact is all, seizing the moment to shove your way to the front and shake a tactical hand. Why else was Abhinav and everyone else at that conference? My own ticket came via an acquaintance's wife, the connection forged one rainy Oxford evening. There is no substitute for doing a favour or clapping a firm hand on a shoulder.

IT entrepreneurs like Nandan Nilekani, his Mr Bean appearance belying his eloquence and success at Infosys, might be twenty-first-century icons. Yet in reality such glossy firms do not dominate India's economy. Its largest firms are almost exclusively family-run, state-dominated, based on privileged access to natural resources, or some combination of the three. They have handed down wealth through the generations, like the Birlas and (until recently) the Tatas, or secured access through personal networks. They have been uncomfortably close to government ministries, or are directly vulnerable to political interference, as in the case of the great unsung behemoths of the stockmarket like Coal India and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, still largely state-directed. The Indian economy is more concentrated and old-fashioned than its global image suggests, still dominated by powerful family leaders with retinues of lobbyists. The room for most entrepreneurs is correspondingly more limited.

Jugaad
may have lessons for the researcher and her general adaptation to new circumstances, notably Kamala. But Margaret Thatcher was wrong. Running a country is not like running a household. The
jugaad
path at a country level may come at the cost of transparency and long-term planning.

Though remember: the elephant-headed god Ganesh is carried by rats.

5

V
EINS

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

—Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre

W
ith months of field work yawning ahead of me, I had a vague sense that it was somehow very important to get to know Delhi, to earn my stripes. I wanted to explore its nooks and crannies. I wanted to understand the wiring holding the whole place together, from the arterial roads to the less visible nervous systems: shared air, water, piping, and, of course, that great underrated topic, electricity.

The desire to explore had a fortunate side effect. Living in Delhi is like watching a horror movie. You scream, flinch, thrill, cry, nurse an impending sense of doom—and leave feeling refreshingly purged. Reviewing her last three years there, a perennially acute American friend wrote, ‘The streets of this city are better than therapy.'

Nothing is more cathartic than locking horns with auto drivers, a constituency upon which God bestowed meekness and financial probity with the same lavish hand he reserved for mining conglomerates and Wall Street. The autorickshaw is an iconic species of yellow-and-green beetle that farts and skitters its way around India. Riding one through Delhi is like navigating an Autobahn encased in nothing more than a sweet-wrapper. Sod your rollercoasters and psychoanalysts. The auto is equally effective and far cheaper.

If
you can haggle, which I can't. Nearly all autos have meters, apart from in the futuristic wilds of Gurgaon where laws are passé. Most drivers are only moderately obstreperous about using them, and under the hawkish gaze of, say, Alpha Housemate even the stubbornest cracks. Unfortunately the proximity of white skin seems to make meters malfunction.

There's an auto parked at the edge of the road. I could just fling myself inside, but all too often this provokes the driver into parping off without a word or a meter, a long gleeful $$$-filled thought-bubble visibly puffing out from his skull. So instead I querulously call out the destination, trying not to sound too desperate despite the fact I have just had a phone call: ‘The honourable Mr X has agreed to see you. Come immediately.'

The driver is thin and creased, his eyes spinning wheels of veins.
‘Nahin, nahin.'
He waves me off. It's too long or short or congested or uninspiring a trip for him to bother. I wander away muttering. Delhi is a lot less strike-prone than West Bengal, where practically every day of the year involves some sort of shutdown, but the auto drivers are one exception. Thanks to their lobbying the Delhi government periodically hikes fares, much to commuters' ire.

On the other hand, auto driving is not exactly lucrative. The 80 percent who rent their autos take home only half the fares; the rest goes on fuel costs and payments to the contractor. Those who own their autos are often heavily in debt after paying huge amounts for licences, which sell on the black market for thousands of dollars, twice the price of the vehicle itself. Then the driver requires clearances, a uniform, and a sheaf of paperwork to be carried at all times. It's a complicated system—though a
dalal
or tout might make it faster, for a price, in another example of
jugaad
—and leaves him vulnerable to being stopped by the police and regularly ‘fined'. I am briefly seized with an attack of white liberal guilt.

A second auto is whining along the other side of the road. I flap it down and he U-turns. He is dapper, his grey uniform old but carefully pressed.

We size each other up like chess players. First I check to see he knows the destination. He's unlikely to say he doesn't, but his hesitation might be revealing. The rare old hand is astonishingly knowledgeable, and most drivers know their own tiny patches. Further afield it all breaks down. Direction-givers are often kindly but fantastically misleading.

But I have to be a bit cagey when asking. If he realizes I'm not sure of the destination, he might be a little
too
keen to go on the meter and pump up the fare by meandering all over town. Thanks to consumer lobbies, the government has begun a slow, patchy process of introducing GPS navigation systems to stop this happening, and to make travel safer. Until this is complete—and enforced—sometimes fixed fares are your friends.

I use some dodgy Hindi to specify the location, which I like to think wins me a tiny grudging point. He pretends to wipe his seat with a grubby cloth, and spits out a price. My move. I feign horror, throwing my hands up and beginning to walk away.

If there were several drivers around they could act as economic theory suggests, competing to give me the best price. Or they could behave like the cartel that formed just outside our colony, a clutch of men eavesdropping and interfering to ensure nobody took a customer for anything less than extortion. (They are almost always men. I have heard rumours of odd female drivers, usually with NGO and state support, but I have never seen one.) This second driver is alone now the first has settled inside his auto for a nap. The negotiation could go one of two very different ways: he could agree to a lower price—or even to use the meter, shock horror—without his peers around to humiliate him, or he could smell a market scarcity and demand a premium.

Round two. He calls out a marginally lower price.

‘Ha! Ha!' I continue walking.

‘Madam, OK,' he calls, and drops the price further. Without waiting for a response, he guns the auto toward me. I calculate the distance. It seems reasonable. I clamber in.

The auto is a capricious and jittery little creature. The drivers must kick and cajole even to get their vehicles to start. Eventually we putter off with the characteristic tuk-tuk sound. Autos run on compressed natural gas (CNG), the result of a clean-air initiative. It sits in red containers at their rear, the green doors often secured only by a rattling scrap of string, so that the canister flashes out as if from an adolescent's low-rise jeans. More than once the gas abruptly ran out mid-journey and we wasted precious minutes (are my minutes really that precious?) refuelling.

At first I high-five myself for my negotiating skills. Yet the longer I sit there, the more I feel a nagging sense that I haven't won after all, especially after he pauses to spit in a way that seems just a little too jubilant. I frequently have this feeling in Delhi, the sense that my small triumph was an illusion. Why is it so important to win, anyway? Why do I so keenly feel my sense of self bound up with these awkward transactions? On bad days it's an indictment of my ability to cope with India, life outside the wood-panelled Oxford womb, the universe, etc.—let alone the imminent encounter with the honourable Mr X.

I brood.

The autos' interiors always cheer me up, though. Like many others, this one's customized. Glittery stickers of goddesses adorn the space above the driver's head. In the shell-like rear, I am flanked by big magazine cut-outs of Bollywood muscles. Lean, fox-faced, two thumbs, it's Hrithik Roshan on the left, facing some pert pectorals I don't recognize. The more enterprising are painted with adverts for acupuncturists and insurance agents. Occasionally they are kitted out with vast speaker systems too, half the size of the auto. Once we acted as a public service vehicle, blasting the cricket scores out at passers-by; once the driver excitedly put on his ‘English' music: David Guetta's ‘Sexy Bitch', blasting out into the night with a throb that shook the whole tin can.

The logic of the road is Might is Right, as even the law realizes: it futilely tries to counteract this logic by holding larger vehicles guilty for pulping smaller ones, something less than popular with my SUV-wielding acquaintances. The auto is a tinfoil bubble, just waiting to be popped or crumpled like a crisp packet under a more powerful beast. It must swerve out of the way of bigger, richer vehicles, zigzagging, and braking. This alone guarantees an adrenaline-pumping experience. I particularly recommend stuffing an implausible number of people in the vehicle so the prospect of toppling out becomes thrillingly real.

Corresponding almost perfectly to this vehicular muscle is a hierarchy of horns. On the horn metric the auto is almost at the very bottom of the food chain, just above the whimsically useless bicycle bell. For a second I hold my breath and wait. The horn comes on as if automatically. An audible whine of a horn signifies a healthy auto with a driver at least remotely interested in his continued existence. A muted buzz suggests even the other autos are capable of smashing us to a pulp. These drivers are the worst of all, recklessly swerving to drive the wrong way up a main road to save a little gas, switching ‘lanes'—there are no lanes—with impunity. I unerringly find them.

Though the drivers themselves make some journeys more memorable than others (‘You are only a guest in my country', ‘Do you want some meat? Very good meat'), conversation is typically a little unoriginal. The inevitable question comes: ‘Which country, madam?'

The auto passes a cycle rickshaw. The motorized equivalent certainly beats the heartwrenching awkwardness of this flimsy older version, to be found lurking in clumps around busy shopping streets. The cycle rickshaw ride is nasty, brutish and short, no cheaper and far slower than its motorized equivalent, but you are mostly paying out of guilt. These are some of the most poorly paid workers of all. The driver is all straining sinews and muscles over a skeletal frame; you'll wish you hadn't eaten that last snack, the memory of the crisp outer shell and explosive tang of a
pani puri
(in Delhi a
golgappa
) guilty in your mouth. My auto unsentimentally cuts him off, and the rickshaw-wallah tumbles off to push by hand. As the smallest fry on the street, he must twirl and wait and jangle his futile bells. Thankfully the hand-pulled rickshaw—hill stations used to have them, pushed by six strong men up the slopes—has all but died out outside Kolkata.